How to set up file permissions for Laravel?

Just to state the obvious for anyone viewing this discussion.... if you give any of your folders 777 permissions, you are allowing ANYONE to read, write and execute any file in that directory.... what this means is you have given ANYONE (any hacker or malicious person in the entire world) permission to upload ANY file, virus or any other file, and THEN execute that file...

IF YOU ARE SETTING YOUR FOLDER PERMISSIONS TO 777 YOU HAVE OPENED YOUR SERVER TO ANYONE THAT CAN FIND THAT DIRECTORY. Clear enough??? :)

There are basically two ways to setup your ownership and permissions. Either you give yourself ownership or you make the webserver the owner of all files.

Webserver as owner (the way most people do it, and the Laravel doc's way):

assuming www-data (it could be something else) is your webserver user.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/laravel/root/directory

if you do that, the webserver owns all the files, and is also the group, and you will have some problems uploading files or working with files via FTP, because your FTP client will be logged in as you, not your webserver, so add your user to the webserver user group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data ubuntu

Of course, this assumes your webserver is running as www-data (the Homestead default), and your user is ubuntu (it's vagrant if you are using Homestead).

Then you set all your directories to 755 and your files to 644... SET file permissions

sudo find /path/to/your/laravel/root/directory -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;    

SET directory permissions

sudo find /path/to/your/laravel/root/directory -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Your user as owner

I prefer to own all the directories and files (it makes working with everything much easier), so, go to your laravel root directory:

cd /var/www/html/laravel >> assuming this is your current root directory

sudo chown -R $USER:www-data .

Then I give both myself and the webserver permissions:

sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;   
sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

Then give the webserver the rights to read and write to storage and cache

Whichever way you set it up, then you need to give read and write permissions to the webserver for storage, cache and any other directories the webserver needs to upload or write too (depending on your situation), so run the commands from bashy above :

sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache

Now, you're secure and your website works, AND you can work with the files fairly easily

The permissions for the storage and vendor folders should stay at 775, for obvious security reasons.

However, both your computer and your server Apache need to be able to write in these folders. Ex: when you run commands like php artisan, your computer needs to write in the logs file in storage.

All you need to do is to give ownership of the folders to Apache :

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/vendor
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/storage

Then you need to add your user (referenced by it's username) to the group to which the server Apache belongs. Like so :

sudo usermod -a -G www-data userName

NOTE: Most frequently, the group name is www-data but in your case, replace it with _www

We've run into many edge cases when setting up permissions for Laravel applications. We create a separate user account (deploy) for owning the Laravel application folder and executing Laravel commands from the CLI, and run the web server under www-data. One issue this causes is that the log file(s) may be owned by www-data or deploy, depending on who wrote to the log file first, obviously preventing the other user from writing to it in the future.

I've found that the only sane and secure solution is to use Linux ACLs. The goal of this solution is:

1. To allow the user who owns/deploys the application read and write access to the Laravel application code (we use a user named deploy).
2. To allow the www-data user read access to Laravel application code, but not write access.
3. To prevent any other users from accessing the Laravel application code/data at all.
4. To allow both the www-data user and the application user (deploy) write access to the storage folder, regardless of which user owns the file (so both deploy and www-data can write to the same log file for example).

We accomplish this as follows:

1. All files within the application/ folder are created with the default umask of 0022, which results in folders having drwxr-xr-x permissions and files having -rw-r--r--.
2. sudo chown -R deploy:deploy application/ (or simply deploy your application as the deploy user, which is what we do).
3. chgrp www-data application/ to give the www-data group access to the application.
4. chmod 750 application/ to allow the deploy user read/write, the www-data user read-only, and to remove all permissions to any other users.
5. setfacl -Rdm u:www-data:rwx,u:deploy:rwx application/storage/ to set the default permissions on the storage/ folder and all subfolders. Any new folders/files created in the storage folder will inherit these permissions (rwx for both www-data and deploy).
6. setfacl -Rm u:www-data:rwX,u:deploy:rwX application/storage/ to set the above permissions on any existing files/folders.